rSlash - r/Scams Grandma Thinks She's Marrying Johnny Depp

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

0:00 Intro 0:26 100k 5:05 All the money 12:06 Comment 13:31 Johnny Depp 17:30 Gift card Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1-866-531 and was thinking, man, this is kind of entertaining. I should read this on the channel. So I thought I'd give it a shot. Let me know what you guys think of this subreddit. It's cool because the stories are crazy, but also it's educational because it'll help you not fall for scams. Welcome to r slash scams where OP loses a million bucks. Our next Reddit post is from Rock and Savior. I'm a 29 year old woman and I'm currently on a weekend trip with my aunt who's 67.

We're sharing a hotel room. Last night, during dinner, she offhandedly mentioned she had a phone call scheduled for this morning but she wasn't allowed to talk to anyone about it until it was resolved. This caught my attention, but I figured maybe it was some legal work she was involved in and I didn't press the issue at dinner Then this morning in the hotel room. She tells me that she's on a phone call with Microsoft and that I have to be quiet because I'm not supposed to be there This is where I see all the red flags

I asked her what's going on and she says she absolutely can't tell me I explain. I'm worried This is a scam. She's visibly stressed out and eventually says, okay, I'll tell you, but I can't talk here because her phone and computer are still connected to Microsoft. We leave the hotel room to go to breakfast. She keeps her phone in the hotel room,

still on the call with Microsoft and her computer is still connected to Microsoft. At breakfast, she explains that this has been happening over the last three days. She received a text alert three days ago from Microsoft informing her that a foreign device had accessed her bank account. She called the phone number for Microsoft in the text message. The number was Microsoft Support. They tell her that hackers tried to take $100,000 out of her investment bank account.

They instructed her to download a firewall software on her computer to keep the hackers out. She does so. Obviously, I know that that was malware, but she clearly did not. She talks to Microsoft the next day. They tell her there have been three attempts to steal her money since they last spoke and that the firewall is what stopped them. They remote into her computer to help secure it.

This gave them access to all of her passwords since she had them saved in the computer. They connect her with her bank and her bank confirms everything Microsoft said is true. The bank then connects her to the FBI who tells her that she can't tell anyone about what is happening because this is now a federal investigation and everyone is a possible suspect. They tell her that she can't contact her investment banker because he's a suspect. They tell her three other people at her bank have recently been hacked and lost money. They tell her this coming Monday she'll have to transfer all of her money to a Federal Reserve account to keep it safe. It's at this point that I tell my aunt under no circumstances

should she transfer money anywhere, that she's being scammed and that if she transfers any money it'll be gone forever. I also tell her that she probably has malware on her computer now. I tell her she needs to get her computer looked at by IT and she needs to get her passwords changed for all of her accounts because she should assume they've been compromised. I tell her she needs to call the real bank to make sure nothing's being taken. I tell her she needs to freeze her accounts and cards. She does NOT believe me. I tell her this is a common scam and she gets angry. She tells me she knows

it's legit and that she shouldn't have told me anything. She said that she doesn't want to talk about it anymore and completely disengages me in the conversation. I drop it for the rest of breakfast. After breakfast, I start googling FBI Microsoft bank scams. I find an FBI official government page that outlines this exact scam and I send it to my aunt. She reads it over. After she reads it, she finally sees the light and admits that it must be a scam. She contacts her actual IT person, a trusted IT person she knows personally. He gets rid of the malware. He tells her to change all of her passwords and call her bank. She does. They freeze her accounts and cards. She is now literally working on changing her passwords as I type this. I want to sincerely thank this subreddit because I honestly don't know if I would have clocked this as a scam as quickly as I did without having been on the subreddit for

the last few weeks. I would read other stories and think, that would never happen to me or someone I know. And lo and behold, it just happened today. OP, if I were in your shoes, I would have grabbed her phone and computer and just run away from her. What's she gonna do? Chase you? She's 67. What's she gonna do? Call the scammers? She doesn't know the scammers' numbers and the scammers don't know how to contact her either. I would have held her device as hostage until she realized, oh wait, okay, I'm actually getting scammed. But you know, your delicate approach works so I guess I can't be too critical. This reminds me of that Mark Twain quote, it's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled.

Our next reddit post is from SlaughteredPiggy. Late last year, I wasn't doing well mentally speaking. My house had just gone through some stuff themselves, and we were just moping and not being kind to each other. I said some things that led them to believe that I was exploring the idea of leaving them. I wasn't. I was actually implying that I was afraid they would leave me. This misunderstanding and general bad vibes compelled my spouse to seek advice from people

on social media. One such friend posed as a financial advisor at an investment firm and suggested my spouse invest jointly in some sort of diversified asset portfolio. My spouse did so by liquidating a savings account they had from before we got married. I had no knowledge any of this was happening as I was busy dealing with my own life spontaneously combusting, and trying to get back on my feet, and generally being a sad sack. This investment had to be made in crypto, of course. My spouse has been subject to multiple rants from me that crypto is a pyramid scheme, worse

than a meme stock, because at least those are insured. So my spouse was somehow assured that the whole thing was legit because only the transfers had to be made in crypto. The rest was put into an account and could be seen in dollar amount by logging into a website which posted transaction history and dividends. A couple of months pass and the investment has basically quadrupled in value. The friend entices my spouse to upgrade the account. This is where my spouse begins to draw from our joint accounts, joint savings, and the

proceeds that we recently got from the sale of our last house. Of course, the friend knew about the fact that we had massive proceeds from a real estate sale because my spouse told them. When we sold the house, my spouse and I explicitly agreed to roll all those proceeds into our current mortgage to reduce our payment by a substantial amount, which would make us better off financially. At this time, as a result of my issues going away and the sale of my house, which had taken forever, I had gotten my act together and was noticeably happier.

Still, for whatever reason, my spouse persisted in hiding that they did something different with the proceeds from me. I was still completely in the dark. Of course, this new cash influx supposedly paid off, and the website reflected even better dividends. My spouse claims that they thought that it was legit because of how crypto was going nuts at the time. Of course, had my spouse checked in with me at any time, I would have immediately clocked

it as a scam from day one. So now comes the real mess. My spouse attempts to close out the investment account. In comes the fees and taxes and whatnot. I am still sitting there happy as can be, thinking how nice it'll be now that I've gotten back on my feet to also refinance my stupid mortgage and have money to finally enjoy buying nice things that we've been putting off. Of course, all of our savings, proceeds, and retirement are gone at this time. So my spouse goes, hat in hand to their family, who loaned them basically an entire

master degree of student loans worth of money. My spouse converts it all to crypto, as per usual, and away it goes into the black hole of fraud, while I blissfully remain completely ignorant like a total moron. Now the spouse puts in withdrawal requests. The scammers get my spouse's ID, account numbers, you name it. New fees pop up. New loans are made. Chuck them all on the pile. Why not? After a couple of months of delays, moving money around to different banks. Yeah, they had multi-factor logins, account histories, and all sorts of nonsense to make it look legit. The spouse starts to get the family coming knocking,

asking for payment before they're hit with taxes. Of course, the in-laws didn't tell me any of this, so they're on my blacklist as well for being complete morons, for not figuring out that it was a scam and not once thinking that they should ask my spouse if they had permission from me to borrow six figures. So the spouse goes to an actual friend, mentions what's going on, and the actual friend blessed them. Clues in the spouse that this sounds fishy. Thus, Valentine's Day weekend, lucky me, the spouse tells me the whole sordid thing.

The spouse didn't know that it was a scam until they started telling me. I clocked it immediately. Through drips and dribbles, I get the damage. It's gone. All of it. Our entire savings. And we're in substantial debts. Our net worth before this was creeping up towards 1 million. Now it's 6 figures in the red. I'm honestly still in shock. My friends wonder why I haven't filed for divorce. Probably because all that would accomplish is losing the one thing we have left as we would have to sell the house. I forced my spouse into marital counseling and will be executing papers to make sure the debts aren't owned by me jointly but just my spouse. We're putting the assets in my name. If I leave, I lose

the house and walk away with a massive IOU. But my spouse? They'd be most of the way to a million in debt to me because of this. I don't know if I have the heart to do that, since none of this was malicious. It was just really, really effing stupid. And dishonest, but mostly effing stupid. Yeah, I'm forcing my spouse to report it all to law enforcement. Of course, the spouse freaked out when I immediately clocked it as fraud and went on a rant. Not kindly about how my life savings are probably right now financing terrorists whose sex traffic teenagers are some other dodgy BS.

Yeah, I know it's probably all gone, and I'm not getting any of it back. Anyways, I wanted to share to remind you all that some knowledge can be much diddlier than none. My spouse is educated, as am I, and we've done well for ourselves through former investments that have paid off. That led my spouse to complacency and faith in themselves. I believe them when they say they didn't know that it was a scam. But that doesn't change the fact that now our retirement is gone, and we have to factor in these horrific debts that shouldn't exist every time we contemplate doing something completely inane, like spending $2 on brand

name oatmeal instead of generic. Please, please, please do not fall victim to things like this. I don't wish this on anyone. Don't keep your finances secret from your family. Always gut check with someone you know in real life and trust when something seems like a good opportunity. As soon as someone proposes any transaction in crypto, it should be a red flag. Just because there's an account, a website, receipts, and paperwork, it doesn't mean that it's real. Down in the comments, people are talking about pig butchering scams, which is what this is. It's when you find one super super gullible, rich idiot and you take them for every penny they have. Thieva Chidero writes this, Recently there was an article about a bank president who

lost 30 million US dollars in a pig butchering scam. He liquidated his daughter's college savings. He borrowed from everyone in his small Kansas town. He stole money from his church. And he stole millions from his bank. The investors and owners of the bank lost their entire investment of millions of dollars. The bank customers didn't lose anything. Their deposits were insured. It was a crypto investment scam. A standard

script. Pay money for fees and taxes, etc. so you can withdraw the profits. He didn't believe that it was a scam until he flew to Asia to meet the people that he was investing with and they weren't there. A bank president! 30 million bucks! He's in prison now. I honestly can't tell which I feel worse about. The fact that all these lives have been ruined by scammers or that these scammers get to

make off with, in the original story's case, $1 million or in the second story's case, $30 million. Or in the second story's case, $30 million. I'm guessing probably everyone listening to this story, me included, is not worth $30 million. We could work our entire lives and never see that much money. But these douchebag scammers get to live their lives sipping Mai Tais in who knows, Timbuktu, Hawaii, tropical locations because they were 30 million dollars now. It's so unfair.

Our next reddit post is from Tonker Turd. This all started a few months ago when my mom saw that my grandmother had taken $3,000 out of her retirement account randomly and she confronted my grandma about it. My grandma then revealed to my mom that she had met Johnny Depp in a chat room and they were engaged to get married. But, but he needed her to send $3,000 to the UN. The UN is the United Nations. So that he could get out of some movie contract and come and take care of her. My grandma somehow managed to go to the bank, cash a check for $3,000 and then send it via bitcoin to Johnny Depp. At the time, my mom thought that my grandmother must have had some sort of underlying medical problem because she has never been like this

before. She's relatively independent, other than some mobility issues and is very sharp otherwise. My grandmother was sent to the hospital and admitted at the time, but they found nothing wrong. We thought my grandma understood after all of that that she had been scammed. She said she understood anyways and we thought that was that. My mom has power of attorney and informed all banking agencies and filed a police report. Fast forward to today however, and it's even worse than we thought. My grandmother was acting sketchy about some things, saying she needed to sell her house. And my mom downloaded the app she knew my grandmother was chatting with the guy on,

then used her email to get in. Come to find out, my grandma has now sent Johnny Depp her card information, told him her address and how much her house is worth, how much is in her account, my parents' names, numbers and addresses, all of her grandkids' names and numbers and even more. My mom has tried over and over again to convince her this is a scammer and she's putting all of us at risk. But there is literally no reasoning with her. My mom was able to get her account shut down and temporarily prevent my grandmother from

sending any money out. But the guy is apparently pressuring my grandmother hard, leading her to do all this insane stuff like giving him her family's information. At this point, she's not only putting herself at risk for bankruptcy, but she's sharing information with God knows who about our entire family. My mom is at a complete loss on what to do, and I'm not much better. So I figured who better to ask than Reddit. Then OP posted an update.

So when I mentioned that we've tried everything to convince her otherwise, I seriously mean it. We've showed her YouTube videos, Johnny Depp's own social media posts, recounts of people's scams in the same and very similar situations, his net worth, etc. Hold on, what is his net worth? According to Google, it's $150 million, but he needs $3,000 to get out of a contract, you guys.

My grandma holds fast that they're engaged and everyone else was lying. My mom did convince my grandma to come stay with my parents through the holidays. My mom filed a police report with our local police department and someone came and reviewed all the chat messages that my mom had evidence of on her phone. My grandma has given this person her social security number, driver's license, and more stuff that we didn't even originally know and only found out after the deputy combed through the entire chat. The deputy then came to my parents house with my mom and had a long chat with my grandma, basically reiterating everything everyone in the comments is saying.

My grandma seemed to be more worried then and called her banking agency, the social security department and we'll call the DMV tomorrow. I would say that hopefully this will be the end of her communication with the guy, but I don't know. She said she believed it was a scam before and then all this happened. OP, you gotta take away this woman's phone. There's a point at which internet access is a threat to her and everyone around her and she has way crossed that point. Our next reddit post is from Competitive War.

Yesterday, I was leaving my apartment building to take out some trash when this older woman who lives here stopped me in the hall and asked if I knew how to send gift cards in the mail. She then said that she had gift cards to send her grandkids, but she had no idea how to send them and needed help. Part of me thought, well, it's almost Christmas and the postal workers are on strike so maybe that really is what she's doing. But sending gift cards did ring an alarm bell. So I go up to her apartment and I quickly see her messenger list and the top name is Agent John and I start asking, who are you sending these to?

She said, to my grandkids. They're with this guy. Who's this guy? Are you sure? I'm pretty sure this is a scam. No, no, no, it isn't. I've done it before. She later claimed that she hasn't done it before.

Her memory isn't great. She kept insisting that her grandkids are with some guy and that this isn't a scam. I decide to shelve it while we take photos on her phone camera and wait to open the messages since she ain't listening yet. I decided that if she doesn't end up believing me that it's a scam, I'll just decline to help her send the photos. So we open the messages and it's Agent John Smith and he asks her if she's gotten home yet. I didn't read the conversation, but I did see the typical scammer stuff. You won a prize, go to Walmart, buy gift cards and cash, don't tell anyone, hurry up, blah blah blah.

So then I say, yeah, I'm sorry, but this is totally a scam. Do not send those. She asks me how I know and I explain that I've seen this hundreds of times all across the internet and it's always the same. She finally gets it and is pretty shook that she got that far into it but was glad that I was there to stop it. She said that it was so stressful because he was so persistent and kept demanding updates. Then she points to another message from my former head nurse at her job who was the one who connected her with this agent scammer. I tell her that's also a scam and her account was either hacked or someone just stole the info. I blocked and deleted both of them and deleted the gift card photos. She was going to send them a thousand bucks. Later, she brought me a scarf and

a hat that she had crocheted as a thank you. I searched Agent John on Facebook and there are hundreds and hundreds of scammers with similar profiles. F these scumbags! Awesomeop did a very good deed, but I think the next step there would be to take the sweet grandma's phone and call her son or her grandkids and be like, yo, let me tell you what your grandma's been up to. You got to come explain to her how the internet works. That was r slash scams.

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